Not sure about you guys, but I detest working in CSS. Not that it is a bad language/markup, don't get me wrong. I just hate spending hours figuring out how to get 5 pixels to show on every browser, and getting fonts to look like a PSD counterpart.
So a question (or two) for programmers out there. How much time (%) do you spend on web markup? Do you tend to do this type of tweaking, or do your designers?
I'm a Java web programmer, and at our shop (with 5 programmers) we have a designer that does virtually all of our CSS.
This is very subjective, and I would close ... but i'd like to hear other answers.
When working on a web-app, without the luxury of a designer ... I probably spend about 10% of my time on the CSS, with a KISS attitude. If I wanted, I could spend hours getting the design perfect, but that should be done after the coding.
What I tend to do is ensure 100% separation of the design. Sometimes, using a JSON/XML based API to contain the entire business logic, and the 'usable site' just backs onto that internally with authorization. This way, the web app/site is just a client of a private API. Then, hours can be spent on design later providing the API remains consistent. It also helps with the asyc UI components to wrap everything in an API you can expose to the client.
I like doing design as much as the coding, I just find the return on time invested is smaller when fiddling with CSS, so put it off for that reason. I do however think that the UX and design is the most important part of a website or app.
I spend about 80% of my development time on frontend code. Out of that CSS and JS work is hard to separate but I'd approximate that CSS (or LESS) coding would be about a third.
Though I'm mostly a one-man show (apart from infrequent design work).
In my workplace we've found that most developers' education and experience is on back-end code. While most can do basic HTML, few are skilled enough to solve/build complex layout problems. Solving cross-browser issues is usually out of their area of expertise.
We've moved our focus to one person in a team of 10 doing the HTML/CSS and handing that as a template for the developers. There are then often some tweaks as the project matures.
If you think of programming as an activity as opposed to a role, then no time should be spent doing CSS whilst programming.
Preferably, your CSS should be created up-front and a style-guide/reference manual/templates produced showing the HTML to generate to get each visual element (then you can go ahead and code).
It's the style-guide you need to go and test in all your supported browsers, not your application. Any errors ought to be replicated and fixed in your style-guide. And if your style-guide is a single-page local HTML document, it's very easy to test it in multiple browsers.